Everyone's talking about change fatigue.

Gartner has been measuring it for years. Employees' willingness to support organizational change has dropped sharply over the last decade; in Gartner's surveys it fell from about three quarters of employees in 2016 to under half in 2022.

So yes, it's real. But I think we're naming it wrong.

What's the pattern?

In my next book I write about what a constant feed does to a human nervous system. It isn't the volume of information that wears you down. It's information with no pattern. Random pings, out of order, each one demanding a reaction. That's what a brain can't rest inside.

Work has become the same feed. A new platform in March. A reorg in June. A new strategy in the fall, with a new word for it. None of it connected. Each one presented as the thing that matters now.

What people call change fatigue is mostly pattern fatigue. The brain is a pattern-seeking instrument. Give it a shape and it can carry a lot. Deny it a shape and even small things exhaust it.

I've watched teams absorb enormous change without complaint, because someone drew the map. "This is where we are. This is where we're going. These three moves are the same journey." And I've watched teams collapse under a fraction of that, because every change came from nowhere.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Connect every change to the one story. If you can't say how the new tool relates to the new strategy relates to the reorg, don't launch it yet. Not because the change is wrong, but because unconnected change costs more than it returns.

Stop announcing. Start locating. Instead of "we're launching X," say "we're at step three of five, and this is step three." People can rest inside a sequence.

And cut one thing for every thing you add. Fatigue also comes from nothing ever ending. Name what's over.

Change has a pattern. When people can see it, they stop being tired of it and start steering it.

What's the map your team is missing?

Related: What year is it inside your company?

Sources
  1. Cian O Morain (Gartner), "Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives," Harvard Business Review, May 9, 2023. Willingness to support enterprise change fell from 74% of employees in 2016 to 43% in 2022.

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote